MS bashes BlackBerry in tablet fight

Microsoft saw more tablets ship with one of its operating systems during Q2 than RIM shipped BlackBerry PlayBooks.

So reveals market watcher Strategy Analytics (SA), which pegged RIM's share of the tablet market at 3.3 per cent, MS' at 4.6 per cent.

No surprises for guessing the top two.

Apple took 61.3 per cent of the tablet biz during the April, May and June, a healthy lead over Google, which came away with a 30.1 per cent share.

Google, of course, is one thing - actual tablets vendors are another. SA didn't break down Android's share of the market into the contributions made by Motorola, Samsung, Asus and co., but whichever way you slice it, not one of them is shipping as many tablets as Apple has managed to do.

Android fanboys can at least take pleasure from Apple's declining marketshare - down from 94.3 per cent in Q2 2010 - but since Apple had so little competition a year ago, such a shift was always on the cards. And its share loss has been more than compensated by the year-on-year leap in unit shipments: 3.3m to 9.3m.

MS deriders hoping Redmond's lead over RIM comes from old-style Tablet PCs will be disappointed: SA isn't counting those, as shown by Microsoft's zero per cent share in Q2 2010.

Overall, tablet sales were up 331 per cent year, from 3.5m units to 15.1m. Watch out, netbooks, they're coming to get ya. ®